So it’s been a long hard slog – see this mini-essay for some details – but we finally have second release candidate for the Fedora 16 Beta. (Yes, you read that right, a release candidate for a Beta: this is not mass-market stuff). If you want to help us ensure the Beta release goes out on time (well, only a week late…), you can download the candidate images and do some of the validation tests: installation, base, and desktop. The individual tests are small and mostly pretty easy to do, and you can a lot of the tests in a virtual machine or (for the desktop tests) from a live image.

If all the required tests for a Beta release pass, we will give this candidate the official QA thumbs-up to go out as the Beta: if not, we’ll have to get the bugs fixed and roll a third release candidate. If the test coverage is incomplete, we can’t safely sign off on the release. So we really need to get all the tests done!

andy: it’s not about RH, really, it’s about what’s important to Fedora. The release criteria are very narrow and basically consist of things that have a really substantial impact on the quality of Fedora if they’re not fixed *at that point in the cycle*: it doesn’t mean that something’s not important if it isn’t in the release criteria.

Xen’s in there because we used to have some releng stuff which was done via Xen and so if Xen wasn’t working we’d actually have trouble cutting releases; now that’s not the case, so there’s no rationale for Xen to be in there. The main virt criteria do not actually specify KVM but ‘Fedora’s preferred virtualization stack’, and the rationale is as it was for Xen: we actually do some important stuff in virt environments, releng and testing, so if the Fedora virt stack isn’t working, it has substantial implications for the release.